Does evolution have a purpose? (Evolution)

by David Turell , Tuesday, October 14, 2014, 20:41 (3691 days ago) @ dhw
edited by David Turell, Tuesday, October 14, 2014, 21:14

dhw: I'm afraid “guidelines for advancement” mean nothing to me. Guidelines provided by the limitations of the organisms themselves and their environment are clear enough, but you seem to be talking about guidelines on how to make eyes, ears, kidneys etc. in an instruction manual that does not give instructions.-Lets review what we are trying to do, establishing an inventive mechanism to create new species, not just minor adaptations. If God placed such a mechanism in the genome somehow and somewhere, He is going to have it do what He intends. If He was so interested in making a universe that allows life, and creates life, He is not going to give up full control over advances in evolution through speciation. Consider that the IM is his alter ego. This does not give us a reason for His evolutionary method, but it gets around pre-programming and dabbling. Threfore, His IM is semi-autonomous and has suggestive guidelines for advancement. -> dhw: As regards the lack of fossils, maybe 1) they are there but haven't been found; 2) there are none because failed experiments leave no recognizable trace; 3) there were no transitional forms and each innovation worked: in theistic terms, this would mean God preprogrammed them 3.7 billion years ago, dabbled, or was clever enough to invent a mechanism that could create innovations that worked. If the problem of complexity can be solved by your God's preprogramming or dabbling, it can be solved by his IM.-Your suggestion about fossil gaps (1) is Darwin's 170-year-old hopeful wish. It hasn't come true and with all the fossil digging done by so many more paleontologists, it is not a likely answer. (2) There are lots of traces of expired species, and we are still finding many of them. Where do the estimates that 99% of all species invented since life began come from except fossil data? (3) is reasoned exactly on the mark. Good thinking. 
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> dhw: I too see purpose in everything: survival and improvement. That explains the bush. What purpose do you see in dinosaurs and dodos if the purpose was directionality towards humans?-Because a semi-autonomous IM makes bushiness. It is not fully directional like a laser beam. But it guides in that direction.
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> dhw: Please explain how the mechanism can be “semi-autonomous” and “semi-controlled” if there is neither preprogramming nor dabbling and God is simply sitting back watching. Your cake is rapidly disappearing.-No it isn't. See above explanation.
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> dhw: See above for the non-necessity of all species, including humans. It is you who insist on trying to read God's mind, by claiming that humans are his purpose for evolution. If he created an inventive mechanism and sat back and watched, that mechanism was left to do its own thing. -As I've explained, God knows what He is doing and what is intended to happen.-> dhw:As above, I am suggesting it would have had two purposes: to survive, and if possible to improve. .....Hence evolution. Hence the bush. And despite our advanced intelligence and inventiveness, I would suggest we humans pursue the same two purposes. Why does this mean that the great higgledy-piggledy process was set in motion in order to create us?-I've covered all of your objections in my above explanation. He used evolution. He set controls in the IM. It created a bush. So what, we are here to discuss it. You seem to persist in asking for explanations for God's thinking, as in that last sentence above. As I have said, I don't try to unravel his reasoning process. He did it and since life and the universe look designed, and that chance cannot have done it, I conclude He, the greater power, exists and did it. I would like to assume He is love, and He has intense concern for each individual, but those are human assumptions, and like everything else about God, we just don't know. If one assumes that the Bible really contains His intentions, then we do know. But humans wrote both Bibles and later committees selected which chapters to include. So the bible is biased.